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The fiction and poetry of the 1930s
The 1930s - different from the 20s. Anxiety. Existential. Back to the story, person as a part of society. Society is important again because of anxiety before the war. Not the stream of consciousness any more. 3 kinds of novels are written in the 30s in English literature: # symbolic melodrama (Graham Greene) # documentary novel (Isherwood) # farce documentary novels Documentary films from Spanish war inspired literature. Christopher Isherwood * English teacher in Germany in the 30s. * His fiction was based partly on the diary, partly on the film technique. =Goodbye to Berlin= * Probably the best book about growing Nazism in Germany. A film is based on it. * In the early 1930s Americans were going to Berlin a lot. OIt follows the development of the landlady and the Bohemian cabaret artist Sally Bowles. Mr. Norris Changes Trains * It reflects the living Berlin between 1929 and 1933. It is about a con-man and double agent. The corrupt, seeds and emotional Arthur Norris. Graham Greene Aldous Huxley * A novelist, essayist, critic, and poet. * His prose is more intellectual, he brought scientific methods into fiction. Antic Hay - it depicts, in a funny way, irresponsible people who try to have fun. - It is set in post-war London’s nihilistic Bohemia. Point Counter Point * Illustrates the nihilistic temper of uncertainty and aimlessness of the 1920’s. Presents a picture of the crisis in bourgeois society. He wanted to achieve a harmonious balance between emotion and intellect. * One of the two main characters is D. H. Lawrence under the name of Rampion. Rampion lives a full and happy life. He is contrasted with Quarles. He is hopelessly struggling to acquire simple human happiness. Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited * Ironic visions of a future utopia. It criticizes and satirizes beliefs in a mechanical world. A dreadful vision of a world where children are produced by chemical ingredients. Love is deprived of all emotion. It is reduced to sexual pleasure only. Ape and Essence * A science-fiction novel. A protest against atomic war. People return to primitive life after the world has been destroyed by nuclear bombs. George Orwell * An important prose writer, essayist, and journalist. He was born in India. He was the son of civil servants; he was educated in England at Eton College. * His brilliant reporting and political conscience fashioned an impassioned picture of his life and times. Burmese Days * He served in Burma. * An indictment of imperialism, it is largely autobiographical. * He shows sympathy for poor people. * Then he lived for several years in poverty. first in Paris and then in London. Down and Out in Paris and London * An account of the sordid conditions of the homeless poor. * In 1936, he joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Homage to Catalonia * The description of his experiences, dedicated the socialists in Spain. * It forms one of the most moving accounts of this war ever written. * He was dissatisfied with the language of essays and speeches on political topics. Politics and the English Language - he wants to do something about the dishonest use of language Animal Farm * It is a brilliantly witty allegorical fable, condemning totalitarian society. * It is a satire on Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Russia and basically on all revolutions. * The animals of Mr. Jones’s farm revolt against their human masters and drive them out. Farmer Jones is the symbol of the Czar. The pigs become the leaders, dominated by Napoleon. * “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” * The ruthless and cynical Napoleon represents Stalin. The farm represents the Soviet Union. * The idealist Snowball, whom Napoleon drives out, represents Trotsky. The noble carthorse. Boxer stands for strength, simplicity, and good nature of common men. Nineteen Eighty-four * It is an anti-utopian satirical novel, a nightmare story of totalitarianism. * It presents a terrifying picture of life under the constant surveillance of “Big Brother”. Describes England under a dictatorship of mechanized bureaucracy. A warning of the possibilities of the police state brought to perfection. * Winston Smith has no heroic qualities, only a wistful longing for truth and decency. He lives in a social system where there is no privacy. To have unorthodox ideas means the death penalty. He knows there is no hope for him. His brief love affair ends in arrest by the Thought Police. He is tortured and brainwashed, when he is released. He makes his final submission of his own accord. The official language Newspeak narrows the range of ideas and independent thought. It is a society controlled by compulsory worship of the head of the Party, Big Brother. Big Brother never appears in person, but his dominating portrait is put in all public places. * The caption “Big Brother is watching you”, is inescapable. Evelyn Waugh * An author of satirical novels. He belongs to the Catholic writers. * His novels are notable for their wit and pure satire. He defended traditional moral values in them. * He satirizes such aspects of upper-class British life as colonialism, public schools, and their manners. Decline and Fall * An extremely witty satirical attack against the English public school system. Black Mischief - it reflects his stay in Africa Brideshead Revisited - a series novel, it portrays with sympathy weak people. It is nostalgic. William Somerset Maugham * Born in Paris. He studied medicine. * Ignored contemporary aesthetic theories. Wrote traditionally realistic short stories and novels. They are characterized by great simplicity of style and a disillusioned and ironic point of view. Of Human Bondage * A partially autobiographical novel, his masterpiece, one of the best realistic English novels of the early 20th century. * It reveals the poverty of the working people. Its main character is a student of medicine Philip Carey, who is disappointed by evil. He finds the meaning of life in his pure affection for an ordinary girl. The War Poets, Poetry of the 1930’s * A group of poets who served in the army in World War I, and made poetry out of the experience. The three who are most commonly though of as ‘war poets’ are Wilfred Owen . Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg . Rupert Brooke , who wrote with feeling about the outbreak of war. Died before he saw much action. His poetry does not in consequence reflect the shock and violence so evident in the other three. * Edward Thomas was killed in action, but little of his poetry is about the war. Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves both survived to write memorable prose works about the war, but their poetry was only indirectly affected by it. The effect of the war on the verse of Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg was to cause them to turn away from the rather tepid romanticism of much pre-war poetry, and to adapt their language to the new and terrible experience. They thus played a significant part in the renewal of poetic language. Poetry of the 1930’s Main poet W. H. Auden 1907-1973, – voice of his generation. * Married the daughter of Thomas Mann to get a passport. He was a gay. When he was 32 he went to America. References to social intern. * Influence by Eliot, Yeats, alliteration. He was concerned to a greater degree than Eliot with social problems. He wrote also several opera librettos. * Disillusion at the en of the decade, more clinical tone in Auden’s poetry. * The landscape of the industrial Midlands influenced his work throughout his life. Began writing at 15, as a student became the central figure in the 1930s group of left-wing intellectuals (f.e. Ch. Isherwood). Background of a middle-class intellectuals. Sense of social responsibility and a strong didactic tendency in his poetry. * Teacher, worked at English and American universities. Became American citizen, professor of poetry at Oxford. Poems, 1930, first book published during the crisis. It focused on the breakdown of English capitalist society. It also showed a deep concern with psychological problems. The Orators , Letters from Iceland , Another Time The Dog Beneath the Skin , On the Frontier plays, often with Isherwood. * His verse is full of topical reference to the social and international crises of the time. It gives direct expression to the anxieties of the contemporary intelligentsia as perhaps no other writing has done. * Interested in verse technique. Influenced by an extensive range of writing. From the alliterative styles of Old and Middle English to Eliot * Interested in Freud and psychoanalytic theory. Absorbed Marxism. After 1940 increasingly committed to Anglo-Catholic Christianity. New Year Letter , For the Time Being poetry in different forms after emigration. * At the first decade of his writing he had seemed to be the voice of a generation, but towards the end of his life became isolated. =Lullaby= * Unusual love poem. Faithless. Gender is not specified, doesn’t matter for woman or man?, Grave – death mentioned, ephemeral – won’t last for ever. Concept of time (of fever, illness, individual beauty). Melodic tone and soft (R sound). Mus'é'e des Beaux Arts * The title refers to the Museum of fine Arts in Brussels. The museum contains Brueghtel’s Icarus, suffering always takes place in ordinary moments. When someone else is “eating or walking” * Bad and sad things, even the worst ones, always happen “in a corner, some untidy spot” * He shows it on Icarus, how “everything turns away quite leisurely.” Although a plowman might have heard the splash, for him it was not an important failure. A ship just sailed calmly on, nothing really happened. end of the 30s The New Apocalypse – Dylan M. Thomas , 1914-1953 * Influenced by French surrealism. Very passionate reaction. * Much of his work shows the impression on his early life of grim Welsh religious Puritanism contrasting with the equally Welsh characteristic of strong emotion combined with his own sensuality. 18 Poems, 25 Poems * Theme is characteristically the relationship between the disorderliness of sexual impulses and the forces of growth in nature. The Map of Love , published in 1939. Is a mixture of prose and poetry. Includes one of his most remarkable poems. After the Funeral Deaths and Entrances , 1946 contains most of his most famous work. The poems show the impression made on him by World War II, * His method strongly attacks on the emotions. Shock of the imagery and the sweep of the rhythm. * Prose works, stores Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog , play Under Milk Wood * Three main qualities: unashamed appeal to latent emotionalism in the common reader, on whom he made a direct impact perhaps greater than that of other modern poets except Yeats. He had remarkable talent as a public reader of verse. His personality became a legend during his own lifetime, especially in America. On the other hand, his exuberance ran counter to the trends in society. Counter to the pre-war intellectual fastidiousness of Eliot and the emotional skepticism of Auden. Those were the two poets with the greatest prestige amongst the intelligentsia in England during the 1930s. Robert Graves , 1895 - 1985 * Wrote vigorous, witty and at times intellectual verse, and novels. * As a poet, he was highly individual. He stood apart from all literary groups. * His poetry reflects the tension between romantic sensitivity and its calculated evaluation. He tries to seek harmony in the controversial world. * He wrote beautiful love poetry and some reflexive philosophical poems. Collected Poems - poems in an intense, clear, and ordered voice. I, Claudius ,Claudius, the God - prose, imaginative historical fictions. ''Other authors of prose after WW II '' * The social and cultural conditions have radically changed after the war. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien - Professor at Oxford. Born in South Africa. Was interested in Beowulf and particularly in the dragon legend. The Hobbit: or There and Back Again * A children’s book, although it is treated seriously. * It is about the fantasy world called Middle Earth. Lord of the Rings * The sequel of The Hobbit, a trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) * An imaginative, profound tale of the conflict between good and evil. A combination of adventure story mixed with Nordic and Arthurian legend. Deals with the quest legend and the struggle between the good and evil. Silmarillion - it presents the mythological beginnings of Middle Earth. Unfinished Tales - it contains unincorporated stories. Angus Wilson , '1913 * A novelist with a sharp sense for the subtleties of English social behavior. Hemlock and After * A sincere study of homosexuality. A tragedy of a famous writer Bernard Sands. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes * The novel includes a mystery of a possible archaeological forgery. It satirizes various social levels and reveals the degeneration of British intellectuals. The Old Men at Zoo * A fantastic nightmare story set in the future. It is told by a man who can adapt to any political change. Finally, he obtains an important position as a manager at the Zoo. ''No Laughing Matter * A family saga covering some 50 years in the history of the Matthews family. * The world in the novel is changed into one bizarre theater performance. 'Anthony Burgess , '''1917 - 1993 * A novelist, critic, translator, and composer; he was later appointed education officer in the Colonial Service and was based in Borneo and Malaya. * In 1959 was found to have a brain tumor. He started writing to earn money for his wife. He wrote 5 novels a year. Didn’t die, went on writing at least 1 book a year. * A fan of James Joyce. ''The Malayan Trilogy - a trilogy about his experiences. A Clockwork Orange , 1962 * Alex is a 15-year-old teenage hooligan. Leader of a gang. The story takes place in a nightmarish England of the future. He gets arrested for raping and killing a woman during a night of violent debauchery. In jail he is treated with a series of aversion therapies. The result of this is that any ideas of sex and violence nauseate him. He therefore emerges a changed and vulnerable man. He also loses his love of music, since he has it associated with violence and makes him sick. He was thus deprived of his most precious God-given gift, his free will. He liked the Old Testament - it is full of murders and blood and didn’t like the New Testament. * The message tells us that even the will to be evil is preferable to purely negative passivity. * After a series of misadventures and another trip to jail, Alex returns to his amoral ways. He is very smart. He is very adaptable. He makes literary allusions and plays with the language. He is also exceptional in that he is educated in art and likes classical music (Beethoven). His family looks after him. The environment is not the reason for his violence, however, he hates this bourgeois coziness. Dim is a policeman, beat him and leaves him somewhere outside the city. He looks for help and comes to Home. They want to use him as an example of what the State does. He jumps out of the window. The effects of the ‘treatment’ are reversed by a seccond treatment. * Burgess invented a new language nadsat, which combines English and Russian. * It is actually a dystopia. It sees the future in a negative way. Violence is described in a comical language, which evokes a sense of detachment. * There are humorous allusions to the style of a traditional novel (Your Humble Narrator). * Intellectuals in 1960s showed their tolerance with violence. He created a futuristic world of institutionalized violence. * The heroes are “dressed in he heights of fashion”, bored. Only violence can excite them. Within one night they rob a professor because he was carrying books, kill old drunk homeless man, steal a car and with masks on burglarize a cottage Home, rape a writer’s wife. * The main hero is a monster and victim at once. The book provokes our emotions as no realistic novel can do. * Alex loves listening to classic music. Loves Mozart and Bach. The role of music is important. How can such a creature love music? The connection music - violence remind of nazism. Burgess was concerned with the horrors of WWII. After the war the idea of a baby born innocent dissappeared. * It is against stripping people off their individuality. The biggest issue is freedom of will and moral responsibility. It gained a cult following after the release of the motion-picture version by Stanley Kubrick. Kingdom of the Wicked - it explores the subject of the early church in the Roman Empire A Dead Man in Deptford - an interpretation of the life and death of Christopher Marlowe 'Muriel Spark , '''1939 * She was influenced by Catholicism, depicts Catholic characters in her novels, but she is skeptical about their motifs and behavior. * She feels that most people live in self-deception, evasion, and lies. Memento Mori - she is fascinated by supernatural processes under the surface of things. 'Doris Lessing , '1919 * Born in Persia. Lived in Zimbabwe. The Children of Violence - it describes the development of a young white woman in Africa. The Golden Notebook - it explores the lives of single women in England. Campus novel * It has a university campus as its setting. * It started with Evelyn Waugh ’s Decline and Fall , continues with Amis’s Lucky Jim 'David Lodge , 1935 * A professor of modern English literature in Birmingham. A critic, author of the campus novel, literal critic: The Language of Fiction, The Novelist at the Crossroads, The Modes of Modern Writing, Working with Structuralism. - Great parodist, humorist and satiric, he is able not only to analyze the style of many authors but to copy them. Parody is the main writing principle of his fiction. The British Museum is Falling Down , 1964 Changing Places , 1975 * Campus novel about a transatlantic academic exchange in the 1960’s. Two professors of literature exchange their places on the basis of bilateral relationships. The American university is very prestigious, the British is only of an average quality. It is a surprise when the highly distinguished professor Zap wants to go to Britain. Both of them underwent a family crisis, that is why Zap wanted to leave America. It comes to a student commotion and Zap is the only one able to react, to calm them down. Everyone starts to respect him, despite the inherent British hatred for the Americans. Swallow is also a star in America. Zap starts going out with Swallow’s wife and Swallow with Zapp’s daughter and then wife. In the end, both start to appreciate their original partners and they come back. * A contrastive double portrait of and American and a British professors who, change not only their places at universities but also their wives. Portraits of universities. * The university in Rummidge is very similar to the one in Birmingham. Confrontation of two universities and two men. Morris Zapp is an author of five books about Jane Austen. His aim is to write about her novels everything. To interpret them into details from any perspective. Phillip Swallow represent the opposite pole of literary studies - he represents English empirism and common sense. He has always read books for their meaning which is not problematic and represents traditional, humanistic approach to literature. * Lodge is outstanding among English writers thanks to his ability to gain his specific humor from a literary speculation. Small World , 1984 * A sequel to Changing Places set a few years later. Dose not only involve Phillip and Morris. Here it seems that the world is one bit department of English literature. It shows the bad characteristics of academic world - jealousy, envy, want of world fame, the fashion of literary critic, small conflicts. * Morris Zapp is the most satirized character. He doesn’t write about Jane Austen any more. He found out that “every decoding is another encoding” and travels around the world to say it to everybody. 'Malcom Bradbury , '''1932 * A professor of American literature, familiar with the atmosphere. ''Eating People is Wrong - it is set in a second-rate redbrick provincial university. Stepping Westward * It is set in the mid-west America. He confronts a British Liberal James Walker with an American provincial university.